I woke up profoundly sad today.
Not because anything happened. There wasn’t bad news waiting on my phone. Nobody hurt my feelings. Nothing fell apart overnight.
I just… opened my eyes and there it was: The BIG sad.
The kind that doesn’t necessarily have a story attached to it. It just settles somewhere behind my ribs and makes everything a little heavier than it did the day before.
This use to scare me.
I spent so much of my life unhappy that whenever sadness showed up again, I assumed it meant I was going backward.
Something must be wrong.
I must not actually be okay.
Maybe all this happiness I’ve built isn’t as real as I thought.
Because the strange truth is that I am an incredibly happy and optimistic person. Almost obnoxiously so sometimes.
I get excited about mountains and sunsets and finding a really good rock. I take pictures of the sky constantly. I love my friends loudly. I laugh at my own jokes. I get genuinely excited when the moon is out.
My life is so full of these tiny moments that make me think, Holy shit. I get to be here for this.
And, in a strange way, I think some of that happiness exists because I know the other side of it so well.
I don’t mean trauma made me grateful. I would never give it that much credit.
There are things I would happily have never learned. Things I shouldn’t have had to survive. Years I would take back if someone offered them to me.
But surviving them changed the way I experience ordinary things.
When you’ve spent enough time waiting for the other shoe to drop, peace doesn’t feel ordinary.
It feels surreal. Extraordinary.
A quiet house is extraordinary.
A safe bed is extraordinary.
Laughing until your stomach hurts is extraordinary.
Having people in your life who don’t make you earn their kindness, standing on top of a mountain with absolutely nowhere else you’re supposed to be – it’s all extraordinary.
Maybe that’s why gratitude has become such a huge part of my happiness.
Not the toxic kind. Not the other people have it worse kind.
Fuck that.
Gratitude isn’t a debt I owe for surviving.
It’s simply something I’ve learned to notice.
And maybe that’s also why I can wake up on a Sunday morning with a profound sadness and know, with absolute certainty, that I have a beautiful life.
Those things don’t contradict each other.
I think we have a tendency to treat happiness like a destination. Like once you’ve healed enough, built enough, changed enough, eventually you’ll arrive somewhere sadness can’t find you.
But – there is no place that can keep out all the sadness.
Happiness and sadness live much closer than that. Sometimes, they’re sitting at the same kitchen table.
Sometimes I’m grieving something I can’t even name while simultaneously knowing I wouldn’t trade my life for another one. Sometimes my chest feels heavy and I take a picture of the sunlight coming through the windows.
Neither emotion is lying. I’ve just learned to embrace them both.
I’m never going to become someone who isn’t sad anymore. I’ve become someone who isn’t afraid of being sad.
I don’t have to pack up my entire beautiful life because one morning my nervous system woke up remembering an older one.
I can just be sad.
Make some tea.
Go outside.
And let the feeling sit beside me for a while because I know something today that I didn’t know for most of my life:
Sadness is a visitor.
Happiness isn’t.
Happiness lives here now.